Birdie Chang doesn't know much about Whidbey Island, only that it is far. On the ferry, she has an unnerving encounter with a stranger, where she finds herself telling him everything: how she was sexually abused as a child, how the perpetrator now walks free, how the calls and emails from him haven't stopped and she is on the run; how she wants to kill him. The stranger poses a shocking question - if she agrees, he will murder the man who hurt her, with no strings attached. She gives him a name.

On the other side of the country, Mary-Beth receives a phone call from the police: her only son has been murdered. What follows is a complex story of three women connected through one man: Birdie, a woman on the run from her past and her abuser; Mary-Beth, the abuser's loving mother; and Linzie, a former reality star turned bestselling memoirist, and another victim of the same man.